Enter Cuquita Cookita  – a gorgeously executed, innovative  ”…business dreamed, created and managed by women who are conscious about the environment and how our choices affect it.” (that’s a direct quote from Cuquita Calvo, one of the visionaries behind Cookita) So committed, in fact, that they import Be Green Packaging’s utility and sushi trays to hold and transport their culinary creations.

Led by renowed Panamanian Chef Cuquita Calvo, patrons can customize their meals from a daily selection of salads, carvings and side dishes to enjoy at the beautiful and tastefully decorated restaurant or on the go at their own convenience. Their gourmet meals are prepeared with the finest local ingredients in truly sustainable plant fiber packaging.

It’s always inspiring to hear pioneering stories of eco-conscious entrepreneurs like the ladies behind Cuquita Cookita and the lengths that they will go to execute their vision and stay in alignment with their environmental and socially conscious ideals.

You can learn more about Cuquita Cookita at their website here: Cuquita Cookita

If you’re in Panama, make sure to stop by and check them out!

Santa Barbara, California

On the West coast of the US in Santa Barbara, CA, Megan Havrda, who is both the Be Green Packaging Eco Advisory Board Chairwoman and a member of the Community Environmental Council (an innovative, SB-local, environmentally focsed non-profit) joined the CEC in celebrating the work, life and career of Van Jones, a notable sustainability and environmental advocate.  Jones is widely known for his role as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, among other things in his distinguished, activist career.

Jones visited the Santa Barbara region to accept an award bestowed by the CEC in honor of his tireless work promoting environmentally conscious values in his incredible career as a thought leader and eco-social activist.

Bluffton, South Carolina

On the other side of the country, the Be Green South Carolina team celebrated Earth Day with Experience Green, a Beaufort county, SC local non-profit focused on engaging the community in sustainable environmental and social practices.  Like the CEC, Experience Green puts on an incredible Earth Day festival and celebration to raise awareness about all things green and good.

Be Green had a booth at this years event and got to meet and engage much of the local community.

Lucky Bolt was founded by visionary Kristopher Schlesser, who saw an opportunity to take food delivery to the next level by using bikes to deliver meals and compostable, recyclable, plant-fiber packaging to carry the food.  Instead of waiting for restaurants to make the switch, Kristopher made it for them by buying the packaging himself and then selling it to restaurants at cost.

The Lucky Bolt concept is taking off and big names are taking notice — we received word that Forbes Magazine just ran a story on Lucky Bolt, their focus on sustainability and their choice to use Be Green Packaging as a central part of their business.

Read the Forbes article on Lucky Bolt + Be Green Packaging by Clicking Here

Green Goes Mainstream

If you haven’t already noticed, ‘green’ products are IN.  While this is great and it’s spurring a whole new wave of enthusiasm for sustainable design and imaginative solutions to our worlds most pressing problems, its also become a marketing frenzy with companies constantly touting the ‘green’ features of their latest products — whether or not they have actually made any changes at all or are just ‘spinning’ how their polluting, wasteful product is presented.  This is known as ‘greenwashing’.  Greenwashing is a practice engaged in by companies wishing to get in on the thriving ‘green renaissance’ without actually doing anything green.  Greenwasher’s will do nothing to change their environmentally or socially harmful product or behavoir but still try to market it as eco-friendly, healthy, or in some way sustainable.  The biggest example of this deception that comes to mind involves food labelled as ‘natural’, which, while it sounds good to the consumer, is a totally unregulated term that essentially has zero meaning.  Companies who claim their products are natural can and may still use Genetically Modified ingredients, which last time I checked involved using a ‘gene gun’ to splice bacterial DNA fragments into otherwise healthy plants so they would have a ‘supernatural’ ability to resist extraordinary levels of synthetic, toxic pesticides and herbicides.  Yup, totally natural.

How Can We Tell What Products and Practices are Truly Green?

Greenwashing is a big problem and it relies heavily on an uneducated population — but how are we supposed to know if every claim on every product on the shelves is true?  We are literally inundated with 100′s of products on a daily basis all making some kind of claim as to their healthfulness, sustainability, or some other fantastic quality showing that they are indeed the best thing yes to happen to the environment.  The problem is that some of them are truly amazing, innovative products, while others are totally trying to greenwash you into believing they are doing something meaningful and responsible.  I received my degree in Environmental Studies and sometimes I even have trouble telling what’s what — so how can we expect the average consumer to know the difference between a truly green product and its greenwashing counterpart?  Simple: Certifications.

Understanding the Role of Certifications in Protecting the Consumer and the Planet

One of the best ways to help consumers instantly identify and recognize truly green products is through the use of certifications.  Certifications alert us through the use of an official logo or seal that a product has undergone testing, review, or monitoring at the hands of an independent organization to ensure that the claims being made about its healthfulness or sustainability are true.   Certification bodies provide a method to objectively evaluate products in a way that gives an accurate representation of their true eco-social merits.  In the food industry, the USDA and CCOF Organic seal’s are perhaps the best known of these types of certifications — but what about for household products, packaging, or furniture?  How do we evaluate the sustainability of these types of goods?

The Cradle to Cradle Certified^CM Products Program

In that regard, perhaps the most respected, stringent worldwide organization for certification of everyday products is the Cradle to Cradle^cm Products Innovation Institute.

The Cradle to Cradle Certified^cm program provides a high level of transparency into a company’s affairs by allowing an independent, 3^rd party organization to review product design, manufacturing facilities, and processes in order to provide feedback on areas that may need improvement or adjustment.  If a company meets or exceeds the institute’s standards, a certification is awarded according to varying levels of achievement along a continuum.

The  Cradle to Cradle Certified^cm standard is based on the principles outlined by Dr. Michael Braungart and William McDonough in their seminal book ”Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”, which laid the framework for reassessing how we view a products life cycle.  According to C2CPII literature, a “Cradle to Cradle Certification is a multi-attribute eco-label that assesses a product’s safety to humans and the environment and design for future life cycles.”  Products (and the associated manufacturing processes) must meet or exceed a series of standards that assess applications in the following five areas: material health, material reutilization, energy (renewables usage, conservation), water stewardship, and social responsibility

If you are an environmental scientist or industry engineer, that description is clear as day, but for the rest of us, it might leave you scratching your head a bit.  In order to help those non-technical individuals looking to better understand exactly what a Cradle to Cradle^cm certification entails, we have put together the following info graphic to help explain the concept in a more accessible way.

(Click for a larger image)

–

Article by Justin Faerman

If you’re in town between January 24th and February 3rd, 2013, be sure to see a few of the independent films making their debut at one of the city’s beautiful, historic theaters.  And if you do, keep an eye out for Be Green’s ad playing before each film.

Maybe next year you’ll be eating your popcorn out of one our environmentally friendly bowls…

–

–

Did you also notice the Be Green Packaging Souffle Cups that the sauces were served in?

–

Every year, the US Green Building Council’s Central Coast Chapter (C4) reaches out to Central Coast businesses, architects, designers, and entrepreneurs to submit their projects for consideration in their annual USGBC C4 Green Awards Competition.  The organization reviews submissions based on a number of criteria taking into account design, sustainability, level of innovation, impact on the community and planet, and more.  Entries are judged by a highly accomplished panel of USGBC board members and professionals residing on the Central Coast.

McDonough is also known for his visionary work as a green architect, which integrates environmentally conscious design features such as passive solar heating and other energy and water saving features.  He has designed forward thinking, green buildings for NASA, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ford Motors and Gap, among others.  Many of McDonough’s projects have been awarded LEED certifications, which recognize outstanding sustainable design elements within new or retrofitted buildings.

On hand to celebrate the event was Be Green Packaging CEO Ron Blitzer.  Blitzer’s company, which manufactures and distributes compostable and recyclable plant fiber packaging, has held a Cradle to Cradle Silver certification since 2010.  Be Green’s product line is firmly rooted in the Cradle to Cradle philosophy as it can be reused as a nutrient at the end of its life cycle in multiple different ways depending on how the product is disposed of.  Blitzer is known to be a champion of the Cradle to Cradle philosophy, and the book is required reading for all employees at Be Green Packaging.

The study measured consumers subjective ratings across various attributes relating to brand perception and environmental efforts such as “is a green company,” “is an environmental leader,” and “has environmentally friendly product’s”, etc. to determine which companies were considered the ‘greenest brands’ of 2012.

Whole Foods Market is widely known for its pioneering role as the nation’s first organic grocery and Proctor and Gamble has been making huge efforts towards increasing the sustainability of its offerings across the many brands it owns.  Both companies have made a huge environmental impact by adopting Be Green Packaging’s plant fiber trays for use in their operations.  Learn more about P&G’s environmental efforts with their new Fusion ProGlide Razor here.  Learn more about Whole Foods sustainability efforts here.

–

Read more about the study here: Mediapost.com

For instance, by cutting out red meat and dairy from your diet just one day a week, it would be equivalent to a reduction in greenhouse grasses comparable to switching your entire diet to only locally grown food, which, while possible, can be difficult for many people.  While most scientific research done nowadays is mostly theoretical and hard to apply to real world scenarios, the research presented by Cleveland and Nickinson was at once easily understandable and accessible to those not involved in academia.  Very real changes with significant environmental impacts could be made immediately if one was so inclined to simply avoid foods or decide to focus on purchasing as many local products as possible.

The talk was moderated by Krista Harris, Editor of Edible Santa Barbara, a free-but-stylish-and-sophisticated quarterly magazine focused on the local, artisan food movement in Santa Barbara County.  Krista’s insightful commentary and knowledgeability about all things local perfectly complemented the presentation.  Anyone interested in staying up to date on the burgeoning local food movement is advised to check out her publication here: Edible Santa Barbara.

Professor David Cleveland and Sustainability Consultant and Activist Seth Nickinson present ground-breaking food systems research